Void Linux

Updating the system with xbps-install -Syu

• We update the system with xbps-install -Syu
• -S to sync the repository index
• -y to answer yes to all the confirmation requests
• -u to update all packages

Installing tools we might need to setup X and i3

Install base-devel git curl wget unzip tar

Install X.org and input drivers

X is a Display server.

Run sudo xbps-install -y xorg-minimal xinit xf86-video-intel xf86-input-libinput

• xorg-minimal is a meta package that includes the X server and core utilities. There is also xorg meta package but it installs a lot of extras.
• xinit contains startx the classic command to start X from the tty. Useful if you are not using a display manager.
• xf86-video-intel is video driver for intel graphic cards. Just in case we can install xf86-video-vesa as a fallback driver
• xf86-input-libinput is a unified input driver for keyboards, mice, touchpads, etc., built on libinput.

Vim

We install vim with sudo xbps-install vim

.xinitrc

This is a special file recognized by X server. In this file we can add commands that we want to run when X is starting. We will add exec i3 which tells X to start i3 as it's main client. If i3 exits then X server also shuts down.

i3 and a terminal

Now we install i3 and a terminal. We start with xterm which is a minimal terminal emulator. The resulting command is sudo xbps-install i3 i3status i3gaps xterm. Later we will replace xterm with Alacritty.

First X session

From the TTY we run startx to launch our first X session. The first time it runs we should see a dialog from i3, asking us whether we want to use the default i3 configurations, we willl chose yes but later pull in our own i3 configurations.

Installing fonts

i3 could be unreadable because we haven't installed any fonts yet. We install dejavu fonts with sudo xbps-install dejavu-fonts-ttf

Installing Alacritty

We install Alacritty with sudo xbps-install alacritty.

Clipboard utility

We can install xclip with sudo xbps-install xclip

Setting up Audio

Alsa and Pulseaudio

We can install all the audio essentials with sudo xbps-install alsa-utils pulseaudio

Enable the audio services

Void Linux uses Runit. But Pulseaudio does not come with a Runit service directory. It usually start with user session, not as a service. We can start it with pulseaudio --start and we can check if it's running with pulseaudio --check and runnin echo $? 0 means it's running and 1 means no. Optionally we can add it to our .xinitrc.

From here on we can now install browsers and apps to our liking.